HOW WE MET: NORMAN STONE AND ANDREW ROBERTS

NORMAN STONE: I taught at Caius, which was Andrew's college and had been my own. It wasn't a terribly interesting year - it was the rise of Goody Two Shoes with a vengeance, and there were some very dull freshmen. Andrew was the one who stood out - he was grown-up in a way that a lot of his year weren't.

Even then, I was getting a bit too old for the tutorial business: I wasn't learning anything from the process and was awfully bored. Also, at that time, the spelling started going off. Having to tell people that "privilege" was spelt with two i's became unbelievably dreary. I tried to be conscientious if students weren't clever, but if they were good, like Andrew, I thought, "Let's put on Schumann and have fun nattering over a bottle." It didn't do them any damage.

Andrew was one of the best people I ever taught. He had the most remarkable capacity I've ever found for compartmentalising things. He could turn out a first-class essay on the basis of having done a quarter of the amount of work of other people, and he could extract the matter of the whole thing and serve it up clearly. So he got Firsts, and I was hugely impressed by that because he ran all sorts of clubs and societies, and he was a good cricketer as well. He was also socially active and fun. He wasn't a drunkard, but he wasn't prissy about drink; and he was a bit of a Lothario. His adaptability and roundedness impressed me.

At the end of Andrew's first year, I was late with my supervision report as usual. Next to the name of the first student, his college and subject I wrote "weedy". I tried "weedy" for the next student, and the next, and then I started to put "quite weedy", "very weedy". I went on like that for about 12 students and then I got to Andrew, and wrote "Thank God for England." He just appeared to be the best of England, he was a good egg, an all-rounder and traditional - down to his flaxen hair and blue eyes.

Andrew's father was a very, very successful businessman - a hell of a nice man who doted on Andrew and set him up with a private income. After Andrew left Cambridge, he was in merchant banking for a while, but then he left the City and wrote a book, The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax. I was asked to review it for the Guardian and was very impressed. First books are difficult, and he'd done extraordinarily well with Halifax, who is not a rewarding subject.

Then I started to see Andrew again at Tory things - Eurosceptic occasions or just parties. I suppose my relationship with Andrew changed after Cambridge, but I was never terribly good at tutor/student relationships anyway - we either got on or we didn't. Andrew and I have a lot of interests in common and talk about politics, history, gossip and the state of things in London media. In 1992 we went on a press trip, which was a riot. We were both covering Margaret Thatcher's visit to Taiwan. I arranged for Andrew to meet Mrs T, and he was like a little boy meeting the fairy princess.

I gave Andrew some history lessons on that trip. I disagreed with an article he had written about Bosnia - the only occasion where I can remember doing so. He had picked up from his Beefsteak mates that Johnny Serby was the one to rely on and so he had a view of the whole business which was rather pro-Serb. We talked about that, and he took the point that there was a very strong Croat case and in fact went out to Croatia to see things for himself.

Andrew has been called "the most brilliant young historian in Britain", but only posterity can make that sort of judgement. Energetic, well-organised and ambitious, Andrew is much more than a Clubland historian and somebody to take very seriously.

ANDREW ROBERTS: I met Nor-man on my third day at Cambridge in 1982. I cycled to see him for a supervision, taking with me a 30-page essay on Edmund Burke. I was told that you had to wear your gown to a supervision, but as I walked through the door the first thing Norman said was: "Take that bloody stupid gown off!" I pointed out that I had this essay and he said, "Oh, let's not bother about that. Let's have a drink and talk." He brought out a full bottle of Scotch; we drank through the afternoon. Norman was the opposite of what I imagined a don to be like. We chatted and laughed and, in no time at all, I was completely sloshed. Norman was as right as rain.

Soon after that, I got my severe bout of hero worship. After an evil Com-munist called EH Carr died, Norman wrote a piece in which he uncovered the man's more horrible personality defects, including a love of Stalin. People denounced Norman for having written this so soon after the man's death, but I thought it was incredibly brave and got into arguments in the college bar in his defence.

In Norman's study, there was a photograph of him in court, looking young and brave, facing some pompous judges. Norman had been arrested and jailed in the Sixties for trying to get a student out of communist Czech-oslovakia in the boot of his car - that sort of thing would have appealed to his crusading sense of right and wrong. This anti-Western propaganda photo was the most cool and impossibly sexy thing I'd ever seen.

Being taught by Norman was fun because he refused to take history too seriously. He was supposed to give a lecture course on post-1939 Europe, but he said, "I'm writing a book about this, so I'm not interested any longer. Instead I'm going to do eight lectures on Jews who committed suicide in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century." Each week, more and more people came to his lectures because they were so brilliant.

Not only did Norman give me the abiding love of history which you need to get a First, but I worked hard in order to impress him. My motivation was to make him respect my intelligence - the First was a by-product.

Our relationship has matured since Cambridge. When I find a subject which baffles me, it'll revert to the didactic nature where I listen and take notes. But when we meet at his club, which is the Garrick, or ours, which is the Beefsteak, that master/pupil thing has gone.

He is wonderful company. He had everybody roaring with laughter at one of Woodrow Wyatt's dinners, when he regaled us with what he'd just read in the KGB archives in Moscow about the last days of Hitler. We were the first people in the West to hear how Hitler died and what happened to his body - it wound up in a car park near Magdeburg in 1973 and was blown up. The book Norman wrote about Hitler, which one would imagine to be low on humour, is extremely funny.

Recently, Norman seems to have been on the wagon. He goes to health clubs - he wrote to me from Champ-neys the other day - and he is drinking far less and smoking hardly at all. Norman is prone to depressions, although I've never witnessed one. All great Tories - and he is a great Tory thinker - have at some stage felt profoundly pessimistic. While it is painful when it's happening, it doesn't make you any less of a great man 8 ENDS